Convocation Dinner Disaster: Guest Blogger Views

These are views sent in by a friend of mine over last night’s convocation dinner. I’ve copied it verbatim. I personally think this best describe the chaos of what happened last night.

~/What a disaster. That’s pretty much what the convocation dinner was at valley view. Where do I begin. Every facet of its unorganized chaos was unacceptable. Living in this city i’ve come to not hold expectations for anything at anytime but you assume an underlying level of sanity, a base standard nobody in their right mind would drop below; but these organizers were not in their right minds. 2400 paying students in attendance with their families graduated a deemed, world renowned university with a campus the size of a small city and had to eat dinner with their fingers as utensils. These students prepared for years to achieve this level of accomplishment and they’re congratulated with coarse, hard roti, a bowl of salt with a bit of yogurt and mutton biryani without the mutton. I mean what moron was cooking, if that’s what you want to call it.

The rice was undercooked with nice, hard pieces slamming into my tooth as I chewed, the chicken fry had no chicken, and the air was heavy with everyone’s sweat and musk. And it was a wonderful, cold batch of food. We lined up and were served each dish in a prison mess hall manner. Even the ice cream was melted! No tables, spoons, forks, or chairs. You want dinner, you eat it standing up. You spend the whole day preparing for the event of a lifetime, saving your appetite for the meal that counts and after all the waiting, listening and crazy procedures, they provide the uncooked food in a room the size of my lecture hall with people packed in like sardines in a can. You have thousands of professional people properly dressed forced to eat like animals. As I entered I saw a lady holding a plate of food, who spat out a bone to her left immediately ahead of my right dress shoe.

I saw a man in a suit standing smack dab in the middle of the entrance licking the yogurt running down his right hand and proceeded to shove rice in his hole with the palm of his hand. Convocation dinner? In what way is that professionally acceptable? Sure, customs are a way of life but there is a level of etiquette that must be maintained. Without it were just another batch of animals roaming the earth. Etiquette is what distinguishes us, humans, from every other species. Were not primal, nor are we like our ancestors. We’ve evolved. And with that evolution comes common sense. Yet somehow, someone organizing the dinner thought it’d be ok to not provide tables for the parents of the students, or forks to eat with or even drinks to wash it down with. Im surprised they had enough plates for each person.

The room lacked adequate ventilation, space and decoration. It literally was a disaster. People pushing, shoving, forcing their way through the crowd with absolutely no regard for anyone else. Chaos is what hurricane Katrina left new Orleans in, this was unmitigated pandemonium, anarchy and there was no natural disaster! The dinner was exhaustingly repulsive. Beyond comprehension. A professional university which demands only the best providing unacceptably poor dinner accommodations; the epitome of irony. Maybe next year they’ll organize the convocation dinner at hot and spicy, just as well.